Click. That’s the sound of a customer seeking out your competitor because your point-of-sale (POS) system didn’t deliver the experience they wanted or expected. You know that your QA teams tested the code and it worked. So, what happened?

No matter what industry you’re in, providing an exceptional digital experience to your customers is paramount. It’s particularly tricky in financial services, as more and more users ditch physical branch locations for online banking. By 2019 in the UK, mobile banking is expected to overtake desktop as the preferred channel. And for two-thirds of Americans, a recent survey found that online and mobile banking represent their primary banking channels.

There are certain inalienable truths about businesses: they all want to succeed and they all want to beat their competitors. What's slightly different is how a business defines success. For a healthcare company, it might be lives saved. For an insurance company, it's the number of policies bought. For an e-commerce retailer, it's shopping basket conversions.

Testing is critical for organizations like NASA, the US Army, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, MBDA, the UK’s Ministry of Defense and the Metropolitan and Scottish Police, where lives are on the line. As we've worked with customers like these over many years, we've noticed how much more testing is than just making sure the system works — it’s about ensuring we test for mission success and continuously optimize mission outcomes. Whether you're designing systems for command and control (C2); to provide support for complex police operations, such as hostage negotiations; or for shooting down an enemy missile, you should plan your testing and monitoring strategy to continuously test against the desired mission outcomes.

Some of my customers are trying to design an automated script to perform specific workflows with a predicted outcome. Unfortunately, the automated workflow they want to execute has many variations in their environment, and they’re having trouble creating a dynamic, automated script that handles environment deviation.

Quality assurance (QA) used to be a compliance activity. You were releasing a product and needed to test it and stamp it “approved.” QA was about testing that the code worked. You might manually test the code. You might have even tried some automation — coding a set of test scripts that would try to capture regressions or errors that you had eradicated in the past, but which somehow crept back in. All in all, you were reasonably satisfied that you achieved a level of test coverage that met your goals. Then, you put your code into production and crossed your fingers that nothing went wrong. And if it did, you tried to fix it as quickly as humanly possible.

This blog is only partially about our newest iOS Gateway 5.0 release with device and simulator support for Touch ID and Face ID (which is super cool, but more about that later). It’s also a blog about how testing has changed — a lot — in a short amount of time.

For a while now (about 10 years), Dev and Ops have been trying to get along. After all, collaboration between the two creates fast feedback loops and gets high-quality software into users’ hands faster. But with a new space emerging, digital experience management, Dev and Ops need to make a new BFF—the business—to stay in sync.

Consumerization, digital experience, DevOps, mobile, fragmentation, and microservices have changed how software products are architected, how they’re produced, what they do, who uses them, and those users’ expectations. As a result, there’s been a massive shift in testing requirements, both in terms of what we’re trying to achieve and what we need to do.

You can find 28 million apps on Google Play and 22 million in Apple’s App Store. Yet, nearly one in four people who download an app use it only once. Apps are incredibly slow under certain circumstances, don’t work in key parts of the workflow, and have less-than-optimal usability. The app scrap heap is growing because many organizations are still testing to ensure code quality, not a superior user experience (UX).

About Us

Eggplant provides user-centric, Digital Automation Intelligence solutions that enhance the quality and performance of the digital experience. Only Eggplant enables organizations to test, monitor, analyze, and report on the quality and responsiveness of software applications across different interfaces, platforms, browsers, and devices, including mobile, IoT, desktop, and mainframe.